The Serpent's Curse

  The entrance collapsed; the rumbling and thundering was now underground. They were out of the mine. Bitter cold rushed over them. They laid the burned man on the ground. He was limp, completely still. His mouth gaped. His eyes stared upward. Terence and two policemen worked over him. Sirens wailed in the distance, coming closer. Ambulances, fire engines. Wade turned to see a plume of black smoke pouring out from the mine in three columns. “Lily, Terence, we have to—”

  “Maybe they’ll come in time to save him,” she said.

  “Sure,” he said.

  The quest for Serpens. We’re closer than ever to the center, but we’re not done.

  Terence helped Lily and Wade to their feet. They left Aleksandr Rubashov on the icy ground surrounded by policemen and medical technicians rushing from their trucks, and ran back across the tundra toward the paved strip.

  “To the airport,” said Terence. “We’ll find a plane. We can be at Greywolf in under three hours.”

  “No,” said Lily. “Alek gave us one last clue. We have to go to Moscow!”

  On the airstrip, an old woman with a mop of white hair bent under the nose of Terence’s jet. She supervised a mechanic changing the last of the three blown tires.

  “What’s going on?” Lily asked. “Who’s that?”

  “I think she believes she’s the new owner of our jet,” Terence said, trotting quickly over the tarmac. “While I was with the police, she commandeered it.”

  The woman was dressed in what looked like ten layers of clothing, and she had a rifle over her shoulder. At the sound of their footsteps, she pulled a hidden revolver from inside her coat. “Stoy!” she snarled, a word that obviously meant “Stop!”

  “Let me handle this,” Terence whispered. “Hello—this—is—our—jet!”

  The woman narrowed her eyes at both of them but did not lower the pistol. She shook her head and said a long string of Russian, ending in, “Nyet. Is my zhet.” Then, without taking her tiny eyes off them, she tapped the gun barrel on the fuselage. The door of the plane squeaked open from the inside, and a young woman poked her head out. “I am Ekaterina,” she said. “I speak English.”

  “This is really our jet, and we need to fly to Moscow right now,” Wade said.

  The younger woman shook her head. “It was your jet. We are taking it.”

  “I have an idea,” whispered Terence. He offered the Ogienko family, as they called themselves, ten thousand rubles to fly them to Moscow in the jet. They hesitated. When Lily searched the net and discovered that ten thousand rubles was about three hundred dollars, Terence quintupled it, which made the old woman and her family ecstatic.

  “But I fly zhet,” the old woman insisted. “Is my zhet.”

  “Fine,” said Terence. “Just let’s go!”

  As soon as they muscled their way into the tiny cockpit, the pilot gunned the engines. A little girl, the English-speaking woman’s daughter and the pilot’s granddaughter, immediately began to kick Wade in the shins, then laugh as if it were the funniest thing in Russia. Maybe it was.

  “We have to tell your dad about the morgue,” said Lily.

  Wade pulled out his phone. “No service. Excuse me, do you have a radio on board?”

  “Yes,” said the pilot’s daughter. “But you cannot call a cell phone.”

  “How about FSB headquarters in Moscow?” asked Lily.

  The woman’s eyes widened. “Do not turn us in.”

  Terence assured them they would not, and Wade radioed Inspector Yazinsky. He was rerouted and put on hold several times before finally reaching the inspector’s answering machine. “This is Wade. Tell my father that the head of Serpens is in the morgue at Greywolf. Aleksandr said it’s in the east wing of the fortress. Serpens is ‘bathed in the blood of the dead.’ Sara is trapped in a time machine. We’ll go to the airport with Terence when it’s all over, but right now we’re flying to Moscow—”

  The connection crackled and died.

  “The relic is in Red Square,” Lily said. “We’re going to Red Square.”

  “What?” said Wade.

  “Red Square?” said Terence.

  “Pfft!” muttered the old woman.

  “Look at it,” Lily said, holding up the sketch Alek had given them. “It’s a red box. A red square. The body of Serpens is hidden in Red Square!”

  “Seat belts. We fly now,” said Ekaterina.

  Terence offered to copilot the jet, but the old woman refused his help. Without much experience at the controls, the pilot moved the wheel first too much, then too little. The plane lifted, then sank toward the blank gray face of a giant high-rise. She tugged the wheel back again, and they rose but barely gained altitude.

  The tires bounced across the icy roof of a second building; the jet dropped off the far side, nearly crashing into a third building until the pilot veered left and the nose lifted at the last second. They cleared the next roof and the next.

  At last, the city below them, an unruly mass of streetlights and lighted buildings, surrounded by the vast darkness of the Siberian landscape, began to shrink and fade away.

  They were airborne.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  As her Mystère-Falcon shot over the tundra back to Greywolf, Galina studied the satellite image she’d just received on her cell phone. Three figures were running away from the burning Vorkuta mine toward a jet standing on the airfield. There was a force of police and a man lying in the snow. Emergency vehicles surrounded the mine.

  “They are charmed, these children,” she said softly.

  “Rather than charred,” Ebner offered.

  Bartolo Cassa sat stonily in the pilot’s seat. “They would never have escaped without help,” he said quietly. “The flamethrower was sabotaged.”

  “I should have shot them myself,” Galina said.

  Then why didn’t I? Seeing them there, children only a few years younger than herself, she’d found herself unable to take the shot. Did she want the children alive? Why would that be? They had followed her, sometimes even led her, to something that was so deeply a part of herself. How could she tolerate such an intrusion?

  Was it that . . . one of the children might turn out to be . . . the one who . . .

  She could not think it.

  Calmly, she tapped in a text and waited as the jet climbed. Triangulate their course. The cockpit was silent for two minutes until her cell lit up with a single word.

  “Moscow,” she read. “They are en route to Moscow.”

  “Shall I change course?” Cassa asked her.

  “No. Ebner will return to Greywolf. You will pilot me to Moscow. Ebner, have a troop of the Crows meet me at Sheremetyevo in Moscow, with a transport. The Russian surgeon has obviously given the children a clue. I will follow them. Midnight comes soon. You shall oversee the completion of Bern’s programming and the successful transportation of Sara Kaplan to Cádiz in 1517. Complete this mission. We need a body there . . . and then.”

  The physicist nodded. “It shall be done, Miss Krause.”

  Galina withdrew a pair of earbuds from a zipped pocket on her coat and inserted them. She tapped an icon on her cell phone and heard the plaintive andante from Haydn’s string quartet opus 33, number 6. It was the same piece that had been playing in the antiquarian’s shop five days prior. As the cello’s insistent funeral march rolled on and the yearning violins begged fruitlessly for comfort, Galina cradled the miniature portrait from Prague. She stared at the face that breathed as if it were alive even now, five centuries later. Inwardly, if not visibly, tears melted down the inside of her breast. Why she loved old artifacts like this was simple . . . and complicated.

  A living portrait, yes, she thought, but how many years did you actually live?

  The portrait’s eyes gazed back as if to ask her the same question.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  Greywolf

  The gunfire at Greywolf grew increasingly sporadic until it died under the roar of the wind through the trees. Midnight was
only an hour and a handful of minutes away.

  The final push to the summit was excruciatingly slow, despite the speed of the snowmobile, and far longer than Becca expected. They had to take a meandering route to avoid the main road, and twice had to shut off the engine as motorized patrols fanned out over the property in response to the gunfire.

  They’d heard Galina’s jet return, just before it took off once more. It was over an hour since Chief Inspector Yazinsky had called Roald’s cell to relay Wade’s message.

  “Galina must be following Wade and Lily to Moscow,” Roald reported.

  “Then why stop here at all?” asked Darrell. “To let someone off . . .”

  The jet taking flight again was followed later by a transport returning from the airfield to the fortress, proving Darrell right. The way the transport had shifted its gears on the road above them had told Becca that the summit was near.

  Then the air shuddered. A blast rolled up the hill from below.

  “That sounded like a bomb,” said Roald. “Or a grenade. Keep moving.”

  Minutes later, the hulking stone fortress loomed into view. It was larger and more menacing than Becca had imagined. A haunted, gloomy pile of stones dotted with black windows and pierced by a frightening tower that flickered with light like a mad scientist’s lair. Roald stopped the snowmobile inside the tree line, cut its engine, and scoured every compartment for more ammo, which he took.

  The howling began suddenly, and Roald stiffened in fear. “Wolves. In the house.”

  “Why are they inside the house?” Darrell wondered. “That’s just sick.”

  The howling was horrific. The wolves were in some kind of pain. Or maybe they smelled food approaching. Becca imagined their snarling faces, snouts, jaws, fangs.

  Roald unholstered the pistol. “The wolves are there to make sure no one gets in before the deadline.”

  Becca pushed the idea of guns and wolves out of her mind. “Wade said there was a morgue below the operating room. Let’s get moving.”

  Her legs were freezing, barely with feeling, but they moved her forward.

  Together, the three hurried across the clearing. They came to rest behind what were likely the original stables, now the garages. The air was unbearably frigid. Becca couldn’t move the muscles of her face. Roald’s beard was frozen. They kept in motion, shifting their feet, wrapping their arms around themselves for warmth. The chorus of ghostly wails from inside the fortress rose and fell, crisscrossed, subsided, rose again.

  “If Galina is after Wade and Lily, then who’s still here?” whispered Becca.

  “Ebner, maybe,” said Darrell. “Or the goon with the sunglasses.”

  Then the sound of a snowmobile sputtered behind the stables. They whirled around, Roald crouching, gun aimed. It was Marceline in the saddle. Marceline alone, an automatic in one hand, a machine gun hitched over her shoulder.

  “Paul was shot twice,” she whispered. “He is below, out of danger of the Brotherhood. He will survive.”

  Becca felt her heart sink, her neck go numb, as if she might pass out. She stomped her feet to regain feeling. “Will the Brotherhood come back up here?”

  “They will. Though they, too, lost troops. And their transport was destroyed. Still, we must do this quickly.”

  Roald filled her in on Wade’s message while he checked and rechecked his pistol. “Isabella escaped from the back of the castle. That could be the weakest entry point.”

  “I will go there,” Marceline said. “You search for the morgue. Ten minutes exactly is all you have while I create a diversion at the back. Ten minutes. If you have not found Serpens by then, leave it. Once you hear me shooting, you enter the front. I’ll do what I can to stop the wolves, then join you in the tower to get Sara out.”

  That was the end of the talking.

  Becca pulled Darrell and his stepfather away from Marceline and hurried to the side of the building. Her heart was pounding. The wolves went crazy against the windowpanes on the ground floor, sensing their presence. Their faces, their teeth, their horrible eyes glimmered in the snow light. Roald skirted the edge of the stables, then loped across the clearing to the back of the house.

  “Ten minutes is nine minutes now,” said Darrell.

  The east wing was a hulk of three freestanding walls, doorless, roofless, and windowless. It hung off the body of the fortress like a ghost limb. But it was free of wolves. Roald pushed into the ruins.

  The charred machinery of medicine lay twisted and mangled, a horrifying mess across the floor. The debris was covered by a thick blanket of snow. Rusted poles, girders, ceiling beams, overturned cabinets, and wrecked carts protruded from the white.

  “The morgue,” Darrell grunted, nodding his head at a portion of the floor that had collapsed, through which they could glimpse a chamber down below. “What did Wade say—bathed in the blood of the dead? The whole morgue is bathed in the—”

  He didn’t go on—couldn’t make himself go on, Becca figured. She found the stairs and climbed tentatively down to the floor below. Four minutes had elapsed since they’d left Marceline.

  The morgue was a black pit, a hole, a concrete-lined grave. It was a crypt for the victims of the Order through the years, the KGB before them. Becca shone her light on the ruined equipment, drills and saws and undertaker tools, mangled with the beds and carts and monitors that had crashed through from the floor above.

  “How in the world are we supposed to find anything in this junk?” she asked.

  Roald trained his light. “Bathed in blood? It’s a riddle. But what does it mean?”

  There was a shot, then two more. Roald jerked back. “Marceline? It’s too soon.”

  “Dad, go,” said Darrell. “No one’s going to find us here. We’ll scrounge through the junk, then meet you in the castle. Go!”

  “Take this.” Roald gave Darrell the Taser. “Be careful when you—” But he was off in the direction of the shots before he finished his sentence.

  Becca pushed carefully through the equipment, while Darrell kicked at it angrily. He shoved aside burned-out cabinets and overturned stretchers and the remains of octopus machines with charred hoses dangling from them. He muttered about time and midnight and his mother. Becca tried to find something, anything that could be a hiding place for a handful of jewels, but the morgue was a heap of junk covered in snow and ice.

  “Darrell, it could be anywhere.”

  “We have to find it! We both have to! The Legacy! We have to stop that witch from . . . from . . .” His fingers froze unmoving above the floor. “Becca . . . Serpens is bathed with the blood of the dead.”

  “I know that! What does that mean?”

  “Where does the blood of the dead go in a morgue? The drain. Becca, they wash away the blood down a drain!”

  She watched him push across the floor until he came to the very center of the room. He kicked at the snow covering the floor. Then his body jerked in several directions at once. He was frantic, tearing around in the debris until he found something, a tool—a two-foot length of pipe. He slammed it on the floor. The air rang with the sound of metal on metal. He did it again and again, swinging at the floor as if he were chopping down a tree. She heard the chink of metal, and then suddenly the drain—a crosshatched ring of metal—flew up sharply and nearly struck him in the face.

  He dropped the pipe, fell to his knees, and drove his hand into the floor, into the drain hole. There must have been so much blood washing down there over the years, but Darrell obviously didn’t think of that; he just pushed his fingers into the hole. When he brought them back up, they were twitching and twisting and . . . glistening.

  She shone a light on his hand. He held an object, a device. It looked more mechanical than a piece of jewelry. Maybe it was both. It was a delicate construction of silver. Twin blue diamonds gleamed prism-like in the rays of her flashlight.

  “It’s . . . Darrell, oh my gosh. You found it! The head of Serpens—we have it!”

  He ros
e to his feet and came toward her, the object seeming to draw the light into it while at the same time shooting it back out in a series of flashes or pulses that set the dark room glowing. Darrell’s face shone. He blinked at the intensity of the light.

  So did Becca. “Is it magic?” she asked. “Is it?”

  “No,” he said. “Something else. It’s heavy. Becca, it’s like ten pounds. It’s hot and it’s heavy and it’s humming or something—”

  A series of shots cracked the air like multiple explosions. Another and another, followed by the spray of machine-gun fire. There was a thunderous howl, then more shots. Roald and Marceline were at the rear of the house, shooting the wolves, and the wolves were out, charging from the fortress and onto the property.

  “Hide the relic. Give me the pipe. Come on!” said Becca firmly.

  Darrell wrapped it in his scarf and shoved it into the pocket of his parka. They ran back up the stairs, out of the operating room, and around to the front of the castle. The timbered doors, studded with iron bolts, looked impregnable.

  She jumped first up the steps and twisted the pipe into the iron door handles. She pulled it down. The handles squealed. She did it again. They squealed more.

  “Together,” Darrell said. They both gripped the pipe and pushed up first, wedging it tight; then Darrell kicked it down. The handles groaned awfully and fell. They shouldered into the doors together. They swung in. The wolves were still pouring out the rear of the house. Here in the front rooms, there were none.

  “The stairs,” Darrell said. “Isabella said Mom is in the tower. Hurry up!”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  Moscow

  Red Square. The heart of the city. The dead of night.

  It had all come down to this.

  Thirty minutes before, they had landed safely at Sheremetyevo airport. Then, disaster. Terence and the Ogienkos were held in a cramped room for violating Russian airspace without proper clearance—or something—a trumped-up charge they immediately credited to the Red Brotherhood. Irina Lyubov was not on duty. This left Wade and Lily alone and free, which they realized was simply because the Brotherhood planned to tail them directly to the relic.